Ogilvy Health Reviews

It was long, hard hours

If you are looking for stability, transparency, or leadership that takes responsibility, you will not find it here. Management is chronically disorganized and largely absent from day-to-day reality. Leaders surface primarily to assign blame when timelines slip — timelines that were often unrealistic to begin with. There is little operational ownership at the top, but plenty of scrutiny directed downward. Layoffs are not rare events; they are recurring. Every few months brings another “strategic adjustment,” with minimal visibility and zero continuity planning. Projects are routinely left in absolute panic and disarray when experienced contributors are removed without transition plans. Each round is framed as necessary for efficiency or market conditions, while the same executives simultaneously celebrate “strong growth” and “excellent financials” in town halls. The cognitive dissonance is constant. Compensation conversations are treated as nuisances. Questions about raises or return-to-office policies are met with visible annoyance rather than meaningful engagement. Employees are told nights and weekends should be “the exception, not the norm” yet they are standard practice — unpaid and expected. We are told we can push back on clients when necessary to ensure that our deliverables are the highest strategic quality they can be, but leadership does not provide meaningful backing when deadlines collide with reality. The expectation is that we do everything fast, cheap, and good with 1/3rd the minds required to get it done - and this is expected of people who are spread across multiple accounts despite an obvious inability to do all of this solo in a 40-hour week (which is always more than 40 in the end). And, since they expect people "in a reasonable distance" to commute to the office at least most days per week which they consider 90 MINUTES or 60 MILES from the office, add a potential hour plus commute onto your nights and weekends and you can see how this job forces you to treat it like its your whole personality. There is an increasing pressure to rely on AI in client delivery, not as a supplement to expertise but as a substitute for it. Subject-matter experts are laid off while teams are encouraged to “scale” with automation and confidence. The message is clear: optics matter more than depth. It often feels less like building durable client solutions and more like presenting polished output fast enough to maintain appearances. The result is a workplace defined by fatigue, turnover, and quiet (though often still loud) resentment. Talented people burn out, leave, or get laid off because they cost too much. Those who remain are stretched thin and asked to do more with less — repeatedly. This is not a culture of growth. It is a culture of attrition dressed up as transformation. Even worse is that they will lay off the people who have spent 10, 15, 20, 30 years with the company prior to their retirement because that's what makes the most sense financially. There is a clear, visible lack of perception of employees as human beings in they way they handle finances and staffing. Prospective employees should ask very direct questions about layoff cadence, raise history, workload expectations, and how leadership measures success and scrutinize the answers prior to accepting a position here. There are good people here. They are simply working in a machine that is not designed for success.